Belt Bought (Suspenders Shipped)
External Hard DriveBELT
Yes, we finally bought an external hard drive (www.buy.com) which is USB 2.0 only (not Firewire as well). It is 160 GB which works out to 148 GB storage capacity. It has proprietary back up software which we used a couple nights ago to back up the laptop hard drive: 2.5 hours for 8.5 GB with a final file size of about 5.5 GB (~33% compression at the highest compression setting). It cost $106 with free shipping and arrived in about 3 - 4 days even though the "free" shipping was 9 - 10 days delivery time.
SUSPENDERS
At the same time we bought a copy of Norton Ghost 2003, the last version of the "real" (that is, DOS-based) Ghost. The two newer versions (9 & 10) are Windows-based versions of Drive Copy, a completely different product that now carries the Ghost label. This will not be a retail version - I believe it will be an OEM install CD only. I have been reading online the
Radified Guide to Norton Ghost to learn how to run the software to make a "image" of the hard drive which takes less time (~1/2 hour) to reinstall in the event of a hard drive failure.
This external hard drive should be large enough to image all three of our computers with space to spare. The next larger hard drive cost about double what I spent for this drive, so the price point was good. As AllanE pointed out, this hard drive cost less than the 80 GB external hard drive that we bought him just a year or so ago. That drive saved a huge amount of time when his work laptop hard drive died the day after our laptop hard drive quit.
posted by LarryandJean @ 12:54 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
And you will be glad you have back-up images of your machines in event of a disaster. Even it is just the time savings for re-staging. When the 60 GB HD on my work laptop died, it took about 30 minutes to restore from the image I had taken of the 25 GB I had used. There's some compression, so the image itself was about 20 GB.
That's the way I see it - worth the expense and effort. If I get stuck on the Norton Ghost, I may email you, though. I suspect I'll be able to figure it out.
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